In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  “I think you have overlooked someone.”

  “How?”

  “I counted four boats at the dock.”

  “Ah, yes, of course. The fourth is not for you. He is my personal guest: a man of infinite talent with a wife he is valiantly faithful to, though his brush itches to trace the pearl sheen on the skin of every lovely woman he meets. He is here on a friend’s wager that a Roman courtesan has more beauty and charm than any he could find in Venice.”

  “What do you stand to win?”

  “A portrait of myself with my new beard and belly.”

  “And if you lose?”

  “Oh, I have not offered anything in exchange.”

  She smiled. There was a small silence. “I am grateful to you, Pietro.”

  “Hmm. I like to think I would have done it without coercion. I know, I know…Fiammetta Bianchini does not ask and Aretino once offended. But he did not come out unscathed either; you should perhaps remember that.”

  He leans over and kisses her hand. It is dark where I stand behind them on the stairs. Small men often hear secrets that were not meant for their ears. But it seems to me that, whatever the past, these two were cut from the same cloth, bred for business as much as for sentiment, and they will fare better as friends than as almost lovers.

  “Ah. Let’s face it, Fiammetta,” he says as he straightens up, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “Your independence was always as irritating as it was interesting. Still, you’ll have your own establishment soon enough again, if you play your hand right tonight. For now, we are both in debt to the cunning of your dwarf. Come on, come out from beneath her skirts, Bucino; it does not suit you to sniff around a woman’s backside, even if you are the right height. My goodness, you have changed your clothes for the evening. We are honored. I presume your wit is as smooth as your velvet. What are your plans for the night? Are you loitering in the kitchen with the lovely Anfrosina or playing the cultivated monkey entertainer here with us?”

  I, of course, would give anything to be there, and my lady would gain from my presence, if only for their astonishment at the contrast between her beauty and my ugliness. But her look tells me quickly it is not to be. La Draga was right. She is more nervous than I realized. I close one eye and wink at her solemnly as I turn to him. “I’ll avail myself of the facilities in the kitchen.”

  “Perhaps it is just as well. We wouldn’t want the Turk to fold you into his robes and steal you away. I hear they have a great fondness for squashed men in the sultan’s court. Though you are a rogue, I would not like to lose you.”

  And so the door pushes open, and my lady goes in.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I have been thinking recently about confession. (These introductory evenings are slower and more formal than one might suspect, and I know better than most the frustration of wasting one’s imagination on events one cannot influence. For all her nerves, my lady has years of experience behind her, and if she needs help, she will ask for it. For now I have time to dawdle.) When I say I have been thinking about confession, I am not talking about my own soul: by and large I am comfortable enough with the weight of sin I carry, which is more than some but less than many. No. It is more than that. Having worked for so many years in the business of fornication, I am curious to know what takes place when all these great and good merchants, nobles, and scholars, usually husbands, who pass through our hands find themselves in the confessional seeking forgiveness for the devils that seem to rise so regularly out of their loins. What a job it must be to hear their stories: all those details; the nature of each impure thought; the choreography of every unclean act. It would take a holy man indeed to keep his mind always on the sinner and not let it stray sometimes to the sin itself. In Aretino’s world, of course, there is no such thing as an honest priest. Instead they are all opening their confessionals to offer personal absolution to the sinful parts of violated young women, or to help soothe the inflammations of misguided young men. But then Aretino has long been famous for his crusade against the cloth and has been known to read an erection into a stiff fold of a monk’s robes.

  For my part, I am sure there must be some good men among them who try their best to keep us within the sight of God. Yet even for them, the gradations of sin within fornication are legion and not without theological confusion. In Rome, before we left, young confessional priests were being given written instructions as to the correct sexual behavior within marriage. I know this for a fact because at the same time as Ascanio was checking the ink line on Giulio Romano’s illicit couples, the press was also busy rolling off sets of confessional manuals. Indeed, it was only from studying a few such sheets held back because of printing errors that we ourselves for the first time realized quite the crushing numbers of sins to which men and women are prone within the marriage bed.

  Some are obvious enough. No couple, however eager for novelty or fearful of another pregnancy, must ever allow themselves to mistake the orifice necessary for procreation. While sodomy will send a man to the stake faster than it will a woman, in the eyes of the Church, it is a grievous sin for both. And while I hear there are a few scholars and medical doctors now who argue the case for pleasure within marriage as an aid to the begetting of healthy children (my lady’s own cardinal had been one of a group of emerging thinkers who were eager to defeat heresy by reforming the mother Church), the pleasure must still come in straight lines. The wife lies down, and the husband lies on top of her. Any excess of copulation, any standing, sitting, lying to one side, or, God forbid, any woman climbing on top of the man—all these would require a visit to the confessional to cleanse the soul. The drama of Giulio’s lusty illustrations and the papal censor’s wrath he incurred was less about the blatancy of the act than about the fact that every single one of his sixteen positions was banned by the Church. As he well knew. We never did such business as in the weeks after they circulated through Rome. But let’s face it—men are more drawn to such things than women are. Indeed, with such a raft of rules and regulations, it is not surprising that a man plagued by such carnal temptations, rather than leading his wife into damnation, should take his sins out of the marital home to the bed of a woman better able to contain them.

  In this way Fiammetta Bianchini, by sinning herself, is actually acting as the savior of others. To which end her cardinal once quoted Saint Augustine to me on the subject: that public women are like the bilge of a good ship, since without them the sewer level would rise and rise until it overwhelms the crew and passengers and sinks the whole vessel. As with a seaworthy ship, so with a virtuous state. After that, when men came to us from their wives’ beds, I didn’t feel so bad if I charged them for a bottle or two more than they had drunk or a whole night when they left before dawn, for in many ways we were sacrificing ourselves for the good of the fleet.

  As for my lady, well, in Rome she had been much comforted by finding the right confessor: a young Dominican priest who did not drool or probe but instead gave a fair penance in return for a fair offering to the poor box. As for our life here in Venice: well, first the sin, then the money, and then the confession.

  From the noises coming from the portego, it seems that the sin at least may be close at hand. The laughter is growing louder, and I can hear voices raised in mock argument and once even in a snippet of song. There is nothing now to keep me in the kitchen. The fire has died down, and Anfrosina (an impure thought that never got as far as an unclean act, though I should admit to the pleasure of a little kissing and fondling) is asleep on the pallet at the side of the room. I am thinking of ways in which to infiltrate myself into the entertainment when Aretino comes to get me.

  “Bucino! You look so melancholy. Don’t tell me Anfrosina has deserted you.” I gesture to the pallet, and he moves over and stands beside her. “Ah! Look at that. It makes your bones melt. I used to sleep with the dogs sometimes when I was a child. I think that was where my appetite for women’s bodies first came from. All those warm bits of fur. I am surpr
ised you didn’t avail yourself of some of it.”

  “I am working,” I say stiffly.

  “Indeed you are, now. Your lady wants you—”

  And I am up and scrambling off the bench before he can finish.

  “Whoa! Not so fast.” He laughs, placing himself between me and the door. “You are wanted—but not yet. No one is to know that you have been called. You are to wait outside the door until she gives you the signal.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Playing a game about art and the senses it engages. No doubt you have seen it before, though it feels fresh as new grass to this audience. Ah, the pleasure of watching a good courtesan work for her living. I will leave the door ajar so you can judge how it goes for yourself. You will know the plan better than I.”

  I wait till he is gone, then make my way quietly up the narrow back stairs and along the great corridor to the doors of the portego. I am careful not to stand too close, but I needn’t worry: no one is looking at me anyway.

  Through the gap I see Aretino sitting to one side, then two other men and my mistress. She is standing in front of them with her arms outstretched and her torso half twisted as if she is in flight from some insistent pursuer. Her expression is one of open-eyed wonder, half fear, half expectation, and the pose is so still—even her eyes are unblinking—that she looks as if she has been frozen into a statue, albeit one whose firm marble breasts cannot help but rise and fall with her breathing, a movement caught prettily enough by strategic candlelight.

  There is a hushed silence for a second, and then a florid-faced stick of a man jumps into view, gesticulating around her.

  “Oh, feast your eyes on this, my friends. The goddess wins my argument for me. Behold the power of sculpture: the representation of nature in all of her finest truth. I tell you, Monsignore Vecellio, even in your hands the painter could not capture this.” And he puts out his hand toward the soft curve of her naked shoulder.

  “Uh-uh. Ne touche pas.” And the room explodes with laughter as the statue moves its lips to address him without altering a muscle of the pose. “The discussion in question, Monsieur Ramellet, is sight versus hearing. Touching is a baser sense altogether, however pleasant.”

  “But I have to touch you.” He moans. “That is the power of sculpture. Why did you think the artist took his Pygmalion to bed after he had made her?”

  “Ramellet is right.” Aretino’s voice comes in loudly. “Although he destroys his argument with it. Think of those ancient semen stains on the great Cnidian statue of Aphrodite. Sculpture has long been in the business of arousing through the eye.”

  “Yes! Yes. And why is that? Because more than any other art form it captures the essence of nature and life. Just look at her.”

  “Of course it’s life,” roars one of the men in front of her.

  “That’s because she is alive, you dolt. She’s flesh, not marble. You want a real contest of art forms, let me paint her. Then we would have something to compare nature with.”

  “Ah, but how would you paint me, Maestro Vecellio?” she says sweetly, still holding the pose. “With or without my clothes on?”

  He tuts and shrugs. “That would depend on who’s paying for it.”

  And a clamor of voices goes up, urging him on.

  My lady laughs and uses the moment to break the pose, stretching her head and shoulders gracefully and tossing back her hair so she can throw a glance toward the door to check that I am in place.

  “I am flattered, gentlemen, that you should be so generous about my beauty. But I am afraid you have played into the hands of my argument. Or rather our argument, because I think, Signor Treviso, that is what you were saying a little while ago”—and she turns her attention on the soap merchant, who is next to the painter and up to that moment has been rather silent—“that though the eye has the capacity to move us toward God, it can sometimes be deceived. Because, while it responds naturally to beauty, beauty is not always truth.”

  “What? Are you mounting a full-scale attack on Ficino’s philosophy or simply warning us against yourself?” shouts Aretino, whose job it is tonight to let others make the running but who cannot keep himself out of the fray.

  “Oh, sir, I would not dream of pitting my wits against such a great scholar. As for the truth of my beauty, well, you would have to experience it to find out.” And she laughs with adeptly false modesty. “No, I am talking about the power of the eye in all its forms.”

  As they sit there waiting on her next—and every—word, I recognize where she is going and what my part will be, and I smooth my doublet down and get myself prepared.

  “I want you to think about love, gentlemen. That cruelest and sweetest of all perturbations of the blood. The disease of which no man wants to be cured. How does love enter a body if not through the eye? A man looks at a woman. Or a woman looks at a man.” As she speaks, she turns now to each one of them, holding his gaze for a moment in earnest conversation.

  “And in that golden look something is transmitted. You may call it spirit, you may call it animal spark, you may call it a damned infection—even the most learned disagree among themselves—but whatever it is, it moves between the lover and the beloved, and once it is received it is unstoppable, traveling down into the entrails and from there flowing everywhere into the bloodstream. Do you not agree, my lord Treviso?”

  Her eye stays on him as he murmurs his agreement. My God, he will have to be very rich to be so dull.

  “How about you, sir?” she says, looking straight at Aretino.

  “Oh, absolutely,” he replies, grinning. “That which leads us into temptation cannot deliver us from evil. Though I tell you, men suffer this disease far worse than women.”

  “You think so? You don’t believe it is mutual?” She smiles, looking around for support.

  The Frenchman shakes his head vigorously. “Oh, no, no, but he is right. I myself have known this illness many times. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I am beset by joy and pain in the same moment. It is a kind of madness”—he laughs—“from which I never want to be well.”

  I must say, from where I stand he doesn’t look healthy either. Aretino is right. Were she to take him to bed, she would need more than La Draga to purge her passages.

  Her eye passes over the one figure my view cannot locate, who I know must be the Turk, and I hear a voice murmur something that I can see interests her, but I cannot catch his words.

  She turns back to the soap merchant, who is agreeing more vociferously now, in return for which he is rewarded with her most radiant smile. “Ah, be well assured, sir. When next time this sweet disease afflicts you, come to me with it, for I have studied it long and hard and consider myself an expert in curing it. Indeed, I have been known to sacrifice my own purity to help others regain theirs.”

  The company laughs again. Dear God, what overgrown children men become in order to get themselves under a woman’s skirts. The sin of Eve. Sometimes I do not know whether to pray for her soul or celebrate her appetite, for without her, my lady and I would be sewing sails and braiding ropes in the Arsenale for eight soldi a day.

  “So, gentlemen. Enough of this carnal banter. Our task, you will remember, is to find the sense and the art form that bring us most profoundly to God’s inner beauty. Since we now have good reason to suspect the eye for its proclivity toward temptation, let us move on to the ear instead. To which end, if you are willing, I have another experiment for you.”

  I straighten up and swallow hard, for I have a tendency to burp when I am nervous, and I would not want to give the game away.

  “My lord Aretino. May I prevail upon you to furnish me with a lute?”

  He brings it over, and I note that while it is better than ours, it is not that special, and I hope she will be able to squeeze some beauty from it. She settles herself into the glow of candlelight, arranging her skirts and her curtain of hair with a quiet concentration that the observer might mistake for a love of music rather than for the perf
ection of the picture she is painting of herself. She tests the strings for a moment, then bows her head, lifts her fingers, and starts to play. While I am for that second nervous that her fingers will betray us, the notes spill out like a shower of gold into the air. I watch their faces. What more could one want from a woman? Beauty, wit, ripe flesh, a smile like the sun, and celestial fingers. All you have to do is pay the price.

  She plays first a short piece, long enough to entrance, brief enough not to bore, for while they are cultured men, they are here for entertainment and, like me, they can sense a climax coming. She lets the closing notes linger in the air, and when they call for more, the loudest voice belongs to Treviso. The look has done its work, and the infection of desire is moving through his blood to his entrails.

  “So, gentlemen. If you are ready? We will test the power of the ear to recognize true beauty. I want you now all to close your eyes.”

  She looks around as they do. “Abdullah Pashna, I am learning that your silence is golden, but I must tell you that right now I think you may be cheating.” There is a ripple of laughter. “Thank you.”

  When she is satisfied that she has them, she puts her fingers back on the strings and starts to play again, and then, after a moment, beckons me in with her eyes.

  I push open the door as quietly as I can—she has chosen a full-throated tune to cover my tracks—and pad over to stand beside her. My palms are damp with nerves. In our time we have wooed and won half of Rome with our games, but I have been as long out of practice as she has. I stare at them seated around her: eyes obediently closed, half-smiles on their faces. How men love to be seduced. She has picked well; the piece has passages of light and sweetness to it, making the moment more prone to magic. She comes to the end of a phrase and hesitates.

  “Gentlemen. No, no, don’t move…. I want to warn you that in a moment I will be finishing, but as the last notes die away, I would like you to rest with your eyes closed for a moment, the better to digest the experience.”